Paul Simon’s poignant last hurrah

Artists have called time on their touring careers before, only to change their minds. Rock teems with never-again bands who recant when the price is right. Prior to 2008, Leonard Cohen had retired not just from touring, but from the world entirely into a Buddhist monastery. He was forced back on the road after his business manager embezzled his retirement savings.

When Paul Simon, 84, announces, early on in this extraordinary, farewell-for-good-this-time gig, that he is “grateful to be here”, it is far more than the usual artist patter to get an audience onside. Having already played one farewell UK tour back in 2018, this titan of 20th-century US song has another encore to perform, belatedly airing a 2023 album he did not expect to make.

Seven Psalms came to Simon in a series of dreams, beginning in 2019. As he was making it, channelling unexpected lyrics and musical snippets from he knew not where, he contracted Covid. Eventually, he began losing the hearing in his left ear. Hearing loss is a special kind of grief for a musician. (AC/DC singer Brian Johnson, afflicted in 2016, took up racing cars really fast. “Don’t get me wrong,” he wrote in his 2022 memoir, “I didn’t want to die … I just wouldn’t have minded all that much.”) Meanwhile, the bewitching Love Is Like a Braid from Seven Psalms tells how Simon “lived a life of pleasant sorrows / Until the real deal came / Broke me like a twig in a winter gale / Called me by my name.”

This tour – called A Quiet Celebration – is just that: a classy, superbly arranged night out with Simon and a crack 11-piece band, in which he plays the Seven Psalms suite in its entirety, followed by a carefully selected run through his back catalogue. It’s a last hurrah in the face of stacked odds, showcasing a very special record that is the equal of the final works of Cohen or David Bowie. Although passages about “the Lord” recur, Simon’s uncertainty prevails, and live, a huskier voice and quivering instruments add to the spiritual vacillations.

He mostly swerves his more easy-going hits in the second set, leaning instead, after a costume change, into songs about human nature or the ineffable. The 1980s-famous Simon could easily be mistaken for a cheery figure, thanks to playful songs such as You Can Call me Al (not aired tonight). Seven Psalms, though, is Cohenesque, wrestling with God, mortality and man’s inhumanity towards man. Sometimes, Simon is assured. “The Lord is … a welcome door to the stranger,” he reckons on The Lord, “Nothing dies of too much love.” But the wider album aches for the terrible happenings in the world, for which we are running out of time to make amends.

The tracks that follow dip in and out of many Simon eras, from the Art Garfunkel years to his brash pop fame. Importantly, his late-life croon can still wrap itself around the melodies. His primary instrument may be weather-worn, but its sweetness is still there, grooved with clever ways of turning lines into conversation rather than high notes. Moreover, the nimble guitar-playing that he picked up from the British folk musicians of the mid-1960s remains absolutely on point, although largely reserved for when Simon isn’t singing.

The cheeriest material tonight is 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, its major-key chorus almost jarring against this more recherche context. Many audience members are keen to sing along to that very chorus, as well as the “lie-la-lie”s from The Boxer, a Simon & Garfunkel classic about being beaten up by life. One of the chief pleasures of this iteration of Simon’s back catalogue is its filigreed musical treatment from the band. In 2018, Simon’s farewell tour was almost too slick an operation.

This time around, nuance, atmosphere and microtones prevail. Half the stage is covered in percussion. Alongside drummer Matt Chamberlain (once of the New Bohemians with Edie Brickell, Simon’s partner of more than 30 years) are two ninja-level percussionists, including Mick Rossi, also on keys, who stands behind a magnificent rig of tubular bells and cloud chamber bowls. 

Throughout, these dissonant, chiming sounds combine with the susurration of brushes on surfaces, while cello, violin and flute hover discreetly in the background. Two deft guitarists handle fingerpicking, while bassist Bakithi Kumalo remains from Simon’s Graceland-era band. Brickell provides vocals and whistling.

Simon classics such as Slip Slidin’ Away, fit right in with Seven Psalms. “You know the nearer your destination / The more you’re slip slidin’ away,” he sings gently, considering how life can seem a little non-Newtonian.

The night’s only finale can be The Sound of Silence. It is easily one of Simon’s most haunting songs and he performs it solo and spotlit, after standing ovations for the band.

With the benefit of 2026 hindsight, Simon’s words about “a vision softly creeping” that “left its seeds while I was sleeping” might prefigure Seven Psalms. The lyrics highlight human folly. But the song’s message seems to be about a deep kind of listening – something tonight’s audience are only too fortunate to be able to indulge in.

Photograph by Jake Edwards